GOP

It will likely not surprise you that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is not too fond of unions. The ability for workers to collectively bargain and improve the conditions of their employment is a threat to the bottom lines of the corporations that make up the Chamber’s membership. The Chamber is motivated to block the power of unions by its desire for corporations to have the ability to keep wages low for their workforce, to limit workplace safety protections, and to make sure that workers can’t fight back.

What you may not know, however, is that the Chamber also opposes other, non-union labor initiatives. Enter worker centers. Worker centers are groups of working people from certain sectors who do not have the legal right to collectively bargain, but are nevertheless an important force in advocating for the rights of workers and their communities. Worker centers might organize for better wages and benefits, or they might educate the public about injustices such as racism in the labor market. They do not have the same legal status as a union, but they provide a valuable safety net to workers who do not or cannot belong to a union.

Apparently, the Chamber is outraged by even that level of worker protection. They have taken up the mantle of impugning worker centers with the ultimate goal of doing away with them. In April, the Chamber released a report entitled “Worker Centers: Union Front Groups and the Law.” In it, the Chamber lays out the argument that worker centers are “union front groups”—that is, that they are secretly unions going by another name and should be regulated the same way unions are. This is transparently absurd: worker centers exist specifically to serve populations that are not served by unions, and they lack the power to collectively bargain, which is one of the defining attributes of unions. The Chamber would have us ignore this clear distinction because it is inconvenient for its narrative.

As is so often the case, this effort to dismantle the power of worker centers by the Chamber mirrors a similar effort by the GOP. House Republicans have vowed to make the same changes to worker centers’ legal classification as the Chamber is advocating for.

Of course, if the Chamber and its buddies in the GOP truly felt that worker centers are secretly unions, they could say that centers should have all of the same collective bargaining power as unions do. But of course they won’t do that, because these arguments are in bad faith: the Chamber and its allies know full well that worker centers are merely a minimal line of defense for workers who have nothing else to protect them, and are unable to tolerate even that meager level of worker protections.

It should not surprise us that the Chamber takes such consistently anti-worker stances. However, it actually may surprise the corporations that are members of the Chamber and proclaim to care about their workers’ lives and well-being. For instance, McDonald’s and Gap both having sections on their websites about respecting the human rights of their workers. These companies should take a long look at the Chamber’s appalling record on workers’ rights and withdraw their funding and support for the Chamber.

Previously, we have explored the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s extremely partisan, secretive approach to election spending. Under CEO Tom Donohue, in the 2016 elections, the Chamber spent nearly $30 million, 100 percent of which went to benefit Republican candidates. Among groups that do not disclose their donors, the Chamber was the second largest spender in the 2016 elections (after the National Rifle Association). Along with its spending habits, the Chamber’s staffing also tells a story of how wildly partisan the organization is. This is of course very different than the wide-ranging perspectives of the Main Street businesses the Chamber purports to represent, which represent every political stripe and ideological bent in the nation.

In a new report, Public Citizen analyzed a database of 157 current and former Chamber employees who previously held jobs that could be characterized as partisan in nature, such as working for an elected official or an outside group with a strong ideological bent. Of these, more than 90 percent worked for Republican or conservative entities, and fewer than 10 percent for Democratic or liberal entities. These Chamber employees worked for 72 GOP members of the U.S. House and 47 GOP U.S. senators.

We tallied 73 different right-leaning entities that have fed employees to the Chamber, including Republican White Houses and cabinet secretaries, the Republican National Committee, right-leaning political action committees, conservative media, and Republican members of Congress.

Republican or conservative entities for which U.S. Chamber employees have worked include such familiar names as Heritage Foundation, Americans for Prosperity and other Koch brothers groups, and the NRA, as seen in this map:

For comparison’s sake, here is the much less busy map of Democratic or liberal entities for which U.S. Chamber employees have worked:

Given this lopsided, tangled web of associations with conservative actors, it is safe to conclude that the Chamber is not an apolitical organization looking out for your local mom-and-pop stores, as it masquerades. Instead, what the Chamber advocates is usually the preferred policies of the Republican Party and those in its sphere. And indeed, the Chamber’s activity has lined up with the GOP’s legislative agenda with uncanny frequency.

At U.S. Chamber Watch, we work to draw attention to the fact that the U.S. Chamber is behaving in a partisan manner and focused on dismantling the public protections that small businesses (and regular Americans) need.

One important way to do this is to ensure that the many companies that fund the Chamber understand what they stand for. Many have consumer-facing brands, and need to be conscious of their PR and public associations. These brand-sensitive companies would never want anyone to think of them as supporting the Koch brothers or undercutting climate change, worker health, and financial safety policies.

We aren’t naïve, and we don’t expect these companies to make decisions solely out of the goodness of their hearts. But what they should do is recognize the partisanship of the Chamber and the danger it could pose to their bottom lines. They know that their ideologically diverse customer bases may abandon their brands if their ties to such a partisan organization are discovered. These companies should stop funding the Chamber.

The revolving door of staffers from the GOP to the Chamber of Commerce is yet more evidence that it is not actually a trade group benignly representing business interests as it claims to be, but rather a partisan organization pushing for a conservative agenda. You can read our full report, titled “The Chamber of Partisanship: An Investigation into the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Dense Web of Political Connections” here.